“Ah, well, it is a long story, and I will not weary you with it; everybody thinks their own stories interesting to everybody else; but, there, mine need not be told. I have been an ambitious, scheming woman ever since I was a woman, and I have always been foiled. Half my life has been spent in studying how I should play the ace without knowing whether I held it or not, and in the other half I have been learning the truth of the proverb that wine poured out is not wine swallowed. Lincolnshire women have a way of talking in proverbs, Mr. Phillips: one can say a good deal like that without seeming to.” Arthur was altogether at a loss to understand Mrs. Somerton; but he boded ill from all this apparent mystery, and yet a voice seemed to whisper hope all through it. “You are in love with Miss Phœbe,” said Mrs. Somerton at length, and with singular abruptness; “I know it. I have not watched and watched with a mother’s eye for nothing, and I think the young lady loves you in return--if there is such a thing as love--and I begin to think there may be, or something better than love, something better than love.” The woman repeated these latter words with unaffected tenderness as she remembered how kindly, how generously, how tenderly, her husband, Luke Somerton, had nursed her in her illness; how when he knew all, he had not upbraided her; how he had pitied her and bade her be of good heart, for that a wrong atoned for was a wrong undone; how in the early watches of the night she had seen him by her bedside wakeful and gentle, but yet manly, as she remembered him when he was young in the grand old Lincolnshire wolds. “Something better than love,” she continued--“friendship, benevolence, charity, sympathy--I know not what you call it; but perhaps it may be love, after all,” she went on; “and I don’t think there is any wrong ambition about you, Mr. Phillips, if you will forgive me for saying so. A man who can sit in the sun painting pictures and all that sort of thing, and be content with it, can’t very well be much wrong, except that he is only a painter after all. Don’t be angry, sir; we never thought much of painters in Lincolnshire; we used to look at them the same as we did poets and such like; but I have heard that some of them make money, and can keep up a good house. However, I will say no more about that; but somehow, sir, I think you will find things going favourably, so far as Phœbe is concerned. We shall see; if such should be the case, Mr. Phillips, no matter what you hear of me, you will not forget that I was the first to give you hope--that will be something to think of, perhaps some little consolation to me.” Arthur was too much agitated to ask any questions. He thanked Mrs. Somerton as well as he could for what she had said, and he began to look out into the future with hope.